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Additional Examples: Drop Caps

Drop Caps

T his effort at producing a
cross-browser, cross-platform drop cap is the result of
discussion on the stylesheets newsgroup, and experimentation by
Susan Lesch, Howard Marvel, Sue Sims, and Eric Meyer. The
problematic platform, in this development was Mac. Renderings on
Win'95 were fairly consistent.

A dditional problems were
encountered cross-browser, and it was found that the addition of
a value for the width attribute was necessary to provide
consistency. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing
elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore
magna aliquam erat volutpat.

Ö characters with
diacritical marks are used here, to explain why the alignment of
the drop cap with the text-top of the line appears to be askew
(see example without background, below). Jan Roland Eriksson
pointed out that the font height includes required space for
diacritical marks, which explains why the apparent extra space is
allowed at the top of the drop cap. Further explanation is
available at the document: Typographical measurement
systems .